A conventional technique such as that disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H8-137810 involves collecting various types of information concerning a network, including fault information; integrating and managing the information; and creating integration information by correlating the information, in a system that executes centralized management of a distributed computer environment. Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H10-275098 discloses a technique of determining the degree of importance of log information collected, storing log information having a high degree of importance to a file, editing the information having a low degree of importance, and storing the edited information as a statistic information log to another file.
Nonetheless, in the conventional techniques, the degree of importance must be manually determined because the criteria for determining the degree of importance are unknown. Therefore, a problem arises in that it is difficult to identify among the log information having a high degree of importance, the log information that is the origin of fault. Therefore, information that is the origin of a chain of faults, as well as any information whose degree of importance is high, is stored. Therefore, another problem arises in that the amount of information to be stored is still large and resources become insufficient.